Trst/Trieste and (Slovene) Servants after World War I

In the period of the Habsburg Empire many servants from the Austrian Littoral and other Slovene-populated lands migrated to Trieste in search of employment. The presentation will focus on how the fall of the Habsburg Empire and the newly established border between Italy and the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes (later Yugoslavia) changed/influenced their status and their working possibilities. We will follow documents testifying how servants who remained in Trieste after the war had to deal with the Italianisation process and how they negotiated their citizenship. By taking into account various sources, particularly census data (1910, 1921), other archival sources (legal documents, official correspondence between the new state and local authorities) and newspaper articles we will examine and compare servants’ demographic profiles with those of their employers.

ABOUT THE AUTHORS

Ana Cergol Paradiž, PhD, Assistant Professor, completed her PhD in 2014 with the thesis Public Discourses and Private Reproductive Strategies of Slovenians in the First Yugoslavia. In 2016 she was elected Assistant Professor for History at the Department of History, Faculty of Arts, University of Ljubljana, where she teaches General History of the 19th Century. She has published various articles and a monograph entitled Eugenics on Slovene lands. She participated in the research “Women and Borders” and “Women and the First World War” and in the research programme “Slovenian History” and ERC research project “Women and Transitions”. She deals with history of science, social history, gender history, eugenics and history of medicine.

She collaborates on the EIRENE project.

Petra Testen Koren is a Research Fellow at the Institute of Cultural History at the Research Centre of the Slovenian Academy of Sciences and Arts. She received her PhD in History with the dissertation entitled Domestic Servants – Women’s Work in the Web of National and Social Relations in the Gorizia Region in the 19th and 20th Centuries in 2011. She was involved in various research projects, including “Women and the First World War” (2014–2017), “Women and Borders” (2013–2016), “Legal and Political History of Women” (2009–2012) at the Department of History, Faculty of Arts, University of Ljubljana and “Russian Intellectuals in Slovenia in the Period Following the October Revolution” (2013–2016) at the Ljubljana Institute for Civilization and Culture. Since 2012 she has held seminars on Cultural History of the Slovene Area and Europe in the Period of Revolutions within the Cultural History bachelor’s programme at the School of Humanities, University of Nova Gorica, Slovenia. Her fields of interest include biographical studies, history of everyday life, gender history, and oral history.

She collaborates on the EIRENE project.